


Children of the Wanderers (Rock of Ages translation)

by Hannah



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Gen, Judaism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-21
Updated: 2011-04-21
Packaged: 2017-10-18 10:58:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannah/pseuds/Hannah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What to do when it's your fate to end the world as you know it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Children of the Wanderers (Rock of Ages translation)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rivkat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Rock of Ages](https://archiveofourown.org/works/151508) by [rivkat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat). 



> Thanks to my betas for consultation and hand-holding during the process.
> 
> A gorgeous a capella version of _Rock of Ages_ can be heard [here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziocxPBxkjg).

Dean and Sam had learned early on how to keep the truth to themselves. Dad had sat each of them down when they was old enough to listen, and explained it wasn’t anyone’s fault, just that not everyone understood what they did or who they were, and it was best to not give out too much. What they did, who they were, it was important, and they had to remember that.

It took Dean years to figure out what Dad meant by that talk. He thought he knew – salting the doors and windows at every hotel and target practice every free Sunday way out past the edge of whatever town needed something killed inside it weren’t things most kids did. That stuff, he knew not talk about it. When he did figure it out, he was eight, and had someone to help him: his teacher, who’d asked everyone what their favorite Christmas songs were, and Dean said he didn’t have one because his family didn’t do Christmas. Even that wouldn’t have been too bad – hey, different people do different things, great, let’s all learn about Ragnarok and Ramadan – but then she pulled him up in front of the class and asked him to tell the story of Hanukkah.

When he thought back on it, maybe he shouldn’t have gone into so much detail about the Maccabees taking the Temple back, but he’d thought everyone knew the story so he wanted to get to the good parts fast. By the time she got back from the principal’s office he was trying to organize the class into Romans and Maccabees, with paper swords for everyone.

Maybe it was because there were Jews all over that Dean didn’t think there was anything different about what his family did. There was always a shul somewhere, and maybe some of them didn’t have the men sitting with the women or had a someone playing the guitar or everything was in Hebrew or everything was in English but it was always the same prayers with the same words wherever they went. If they were everywhere, then people should know about them.

He told Dad that when he was done in the principal’s office, and Dad laughed his this-is-funny-sad laugh, and told Dean it didn’t work like that.

“Like hunting?”

Dad laughed again. “Yeah. Kind of like hunting.”

-

There were hunters everywhere, too. It wasn’t like they were in every town and city – if they were, Dean knew they could handle stuff in their own backyards, the way Uncle Rufus kept his town poltergeist-free – but they were all over the place. Dad could make a call from a gas station while Sammy picked out another coloring book and Dean kept an eye on him and by the time they got to their hotel there’d be someone waiting for Dad, ready to start tracking the bad guys down then and there.

If it was Friday night, Dean would skip the junk food at the gift shop and walk to a grocery store, get some grape juice, a couple of rolls, real chicken even if it came in a bucket. He’d push a chair onto a table and take out the smoke alarm’s batteries so the candles wouldn’t set anything off. He and Sammy would have their Sabbath dinner sitting on the floor, eating with their hands because it tasted better that way, and Dean wouldn’t even turn the TV on all day, not until it got dark.

When they were at Uncle Rufus’ they didn’t need to bother with all of that, just went through everything the way it was supposed to go, no fussing with the candles or anything. It was even better there because they could go out for target practice too, stay sharp and alert when Dad wasn’t around, and Sammy could eat real food cooked in a kitchen. Rufus had a mezuzah on the front door and another by the front gate, blue glass eyes and metal hands hung around the house keeping watch, and stories of how his grandfather watched Houdini’s escapes whenever the escapist came to Chicago. Rufus’ family had come to America in chains and became Jews like their owners, and stayed with their religion even after they were free.

They didn’t go to anyone else’s houses, even if they were one of the staying-put hunters and not the traveling kind like Dean’s family was. Hunters kept to themselves, kept things private, to keep everyone else around them safe. Sam argued with Dad and Rufus about it – if everyone knew, then couldn’t everyone keep themselves safe? Wouldn’t everyone paint the right sigils onto the doors and keep herbs in the walls and then they wouldn’t need so many hunters?

The only answers Sam got were that it wasn’t that simple and it wasn’t that easy, and that just made him turn around and look for better arguments to prepare for the next time he could bring up the subject.

He didn’t argue with anyone when they said there’d always be hunters. That was something none of them touched. When he’d found out monsters were real, it was Dean’s twelfth birthday and Dad had left them alone for longer than usual, three days moving to five and then six.

“If he’s alive.”

Dean had gotten his hands on some pie – nobody around to say he couldn’t have birthday pie if he wanted, who wanted to have cake on your birthday when pie was so much better – and he’d cut Sam his piece and was trying to talk around a mouthful of pumpkin. “Don’t say that. Of course he’s alive. He’s Dad.”

Sam picked at his slice, leaving the rest to Dean, and it didn’t taste good anymore the way Sammy was looking at it. He ended up throwing the rest of it away in the dumpster at the end of the parking lot. At least he hadn’t paid for it. When he got back to the room, Sam was sitting on the edge of his bed, something in his hands.

“Here.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a birthday present. Uncle Rufus gave it to me for Dad –”

“Dad’s birthday isn’t for months. Keep it for him.”

“Dad lied to me. I want you to have it,” Sam said in the same voice he argued with. “And Uncle Rufus told me we don’t see him enough so he should give it to me now. Take it.” Sam held his arm out and Dean took the little package wrapped up in old comics from a newspaper. “He told me it was real special.”

It was a little kimiyah, tiny, shiny coppery metal, ‘life’ in Hebrew on the front, hanging on black string. Something to carry with him. “Thank you, Sam.” He put it on, held it in his hand, felt its cold weight on his palm, “I love it.”

“Happy birthday, Dean.”

-

Dean got his GED when he was sixteen, fourteen months shy of when he’d have graduated if his life was a little more normal. Sammy stuck it out for the whole twelve years, already worn to the stuttering and stopping pace of moving around every time Dad got a new job. The only time they were close to tethered was the year of his Bar Mitzvah, and even then Dad wasn’t able to stick around for the whole stretch or even the big event. He didn’t really care for the religion or the rituals anymore, but didn’t make a fuss when Sam started to wear his kippah everywhere and took the time to pray every day. Neither did Dean. He knew if there was anyone with a problem with that, it wasn’t Sam.

“Your mother wasn’t very religious when we met,” Dad said when he and Dean were watching a werewolf burn while Sammy waited back in the car. Dean kept his mouth shut and Dad went on, “After we were married, she went – she started baking challah every Friday, skirts and scarves all the time. Every blessing. She thrived on it. You remember how happy she was.” He stared into the fire, turning his hand to cup his fingers in his palm to catch the fire’s reflection, and Dean did the same: it was an hour past sunset and time for havdalah. “If she knew.”

If she was here, Dad meant. If it hadn’t come into the bedroom, she’d be here. If she was here we wouldn’t be. Dean stared at the fire shining on his nails, “We’ll get it someday.”

-

They usually ignored anything that anyone called “God’s will,” especially those standard Bible-thumping preachers doing their damn best to justify their cause of the moment. It was when someone got stabbed in cold blood over it and didn’t try to justify it as anything but, and was the second person in one town to do it in three weeks, that it was time to call in the professionals.

“So Gloria’s just your standard issue wacko?”

“If it was just her.” Sam shucked off his jacket, flopped down on his bed. “Probably a demon or spirit, something that wants to see its idea of justice done, possessing people who can’t say no and won’t move on unless we give it a push.”

“Great, point me at it.”

“It’s just weird – I was at her place and no sulfur, no EMF.”

“Whatever it was, it was telling those poor bastards to hunt down evildoers, right?”

“Well, Carl Gully, I couldn’t find any dirt on him. Lots of friends, regular churchgoer –”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not there. We should check out his place.” Sam didn’t look up. “Come on, man, I’m going stir-crazy in here.”

“Yeah. It’s that…” he trailed off, moving to stare at the other side of the room.

“Is it the holy water? That stuff works, man. Look, maybe it’s just a ghost, we won’t even need any.”

Sam shook his head before looking up at Dean. “She seemed happy.”

“Gloria?”

“Yeah. She’ll be spending the rest of her life in a locked ward unless someone gets her off on insanity and good behavior, but she’s happy. She thinks she’s done God’s work.”

“And you’re jealous because she’s, what, she’s got faith in what she did.” Sam kept looking at him. “Oh, knock off the puppy-dog eyes. Anyone who can get pushed over like that would be happy about anything anyone tells them. Dollars to doughnuts she’d have believed this thing if it said it was, a, a fairy, or a unicorn, Martian, whatever. And maybe these randoms are evil, doesn’t matter, we’ve got our own job to do.”

“You think so? Angels descending to Earth, that’s one thing you can believe, but an angel that can’t get its hands dirty isn’t?”

Dean crossed his arms over his chest. “An angel that can’t get its hands dirty is no messenger of God.”

-

In a kitchen made of Thomas Kinkade vomit mixed with Claymation specials, bound to a chair all wreathed up to be sacrificed to some freaking Pagans, getting fucking sliced up, and Dean knew the thing that pissed Sam off the most was that his hat was still in the basement.

“Leave him alone, you son of a bitch!”

“Hear how they talk to us? To gods?” Edward laughed. “Listen, pal, back in the day we were worshipped by millions.”

Sam was hissing, panting, fuck. Dean gritted his teeth. “Times have changed!”

“Tell me about it. All of a sudden, this Jesus character is the hot new thing in town. All of a sudden, our altars are being burned down and we’re being hunted down like common monsters.” He took a suck on his pipe and grinned at Dean and were those fangs in his mouth? “I’d think you two could sympathize. Tell me, what did those Christians do to your temples? Your tribes?”

“This is not the same thing!” Dean shouted.

“I’m sure it doesn’t seem that way to you, dear,” Madge said. She patted his arm with the flat of the blade, Sam’s blood wet on his skin. “But I think if we could have a chat with your man upstairs he’d say something different.” She smiled and nope, no fangs in her mouth, just regular teeth too good to be true. “It’s too bad about you people, it really is. But look on the bright side! You’ll finally have yourselves a real Christmas.”

“You’re not really selling it, lady.”

She kept on smiling as she cut him, pulled out Sam’s goddamn nail and almost getting one of his teeth, so goddamn psychotic Dean knew he’d want to kill her even if she wasn’t evil through-and-through. He got his chance with Edward, staking him a couple more times than he probably needed to get him good and dead.

Sam wiped off his forehead, ran his fingers through his hair. Dean shook his head. “Fucking goyim.”

“Gentiles, Dean. Be polite.”

And maybe it was because gods were normally way over their pay grade or maybe it was he had just over five months left or maybe it was the way Sam said it all throaty and tired, that Dean couldn’t help but laugh.

-

Getting to say ‘I told you so’ never felt as good as it was supposed to. Henrickssen didn’t look too happy with it, either, and Dean couldn’t blame him a bit. He’d heard about Lilith months ago, when Richie tipped him off about that town and Casey went on and on about the first wife of Adam. If something of her caliber was gunning for him and Sam, there probably wasn’t much that could get in her way. No use sugar-coating it for the guy. There was something really freeing in knowing he was going out and could say whatever the hell he wanted in the meantime.

“Honestly, I think the world’s gonna end bloody,” Dean said. “But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight. We do have choices.” That was what it all came down to: the choices he made. He smiled as best he could. “I choose to go down swinging.”

-

There was only one thing Dean didn’t remember about his time downstairs. He didn’t stop to think about it when he was digging his way out of his grave, when the air screamed and the windows shattered, when Rufus hung up on him in the phone booth and then attacked him before he got two steps in the door and didn’t believe him until after he cut himself with the knife. There wasn’t any time.

He promised Rufus and Sam he didn’t remember, and it was true, it was that last, that one thing he didn’t. Everything else was perfect, the sort of perfect he knew he’d have forever, forty extra years battering around in his skull. Forty years in exile, in the desert, long enough that there wouldn’t be anyone left who remembered slavery to enter the promised land. The slave mentality had to be gone, but the history and memory would remain forever. And by God, Dean remembered.

He laughed when Sam passed him his first beer topside. “Just because we don’t believe in Hell doesn’t mean Hell doesn’t believe in us.”

“You have no idea how comforting that is.” Sam took a long pull from his own bottle, staring at Dean like he’d evaporate in the sun or flicker away at any moment. There was something hard to his face that hadn’t been there the last – just a few months ago, right, just a few months, not years for Sam. Dean didn’t like it: Sammy just didn’t look like Sammy without his hat.

“All right, then” Rufus said, snapping them out of it. “I’ve gone through everyone I know, everyone they know, everyone they think they know, and I think I found someone the next state over. You two up for a drive?”

They ended up in the kitchen of the only strict kabbalist in New Hampshire. Ken Gershon had moved up to the mountains to retire from busy city life, raise a few chickens, and scrape a minyan together on the major holidays if he was lucky. He sat everyone down at the table with glasses of scotch and fresh cookies all around and listened long and hard before saying anything.

“There’s no chance this was a demon.”

Sam rolled his eyes.

Ken went on, “Dean, from what you’re telling me, they wanted you downstairs. They wouldn’t be canny enough to let you up since there isn’t anything you could do for them up here.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“Double-bluff gambits aren’t demon style. They’ve been coming after you two how long?” He drained his glass and poured himself another. “No, it’d be better for them to keep you down there. Something broke you out and dragged you up.”

“Any idea what that might be?” Rufus held his own glass out.

“Nothing nice.”

When Castiel brought down the house, parting the doors like the goddamn Red Sea and striding past everything like it was nothing, Dean swore there wasn’t anything flashing over his vision along with the flying sparks. When Castiel proclaimed, “I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition,” it still wasn’t enough to bring back anything stronger than a half-remembered dream.

If there was anyone on earth who could look less like an angel, it was the Columbo lookalike standing before him; if there was anything that felt more like an angel, power and dread and glory ripping through the air when he spread the shadows of his wings, Dean didn’t know what that could be.

“Why’d you do it?” Dean demanded.

“Because God commanded it. Because He has work for you.”

It took falling asleep and dreaming to remember everything about the end, all of it coming back right away all at once too jumbled and fast: the chains, the screams, then the light and the cries coming in like the tide, and something great and terrifying roaring like the sound of the sun. Breaking him free from the rack, the great and terrifying thing looked right to the very essence of Dean and drew its head back to command him to fear not.

Dean woke up cold, shivering, and sick. He padded to the bathroom, flicked on the light and rolled up his sleeve to look at the handprint again. It didn’t feel any different from either side; it just felt like a scar. One that’d be impossible to explain away as a camping accident or car repairs gone wrong or a vicious dog two towns over – even falling face-down into a gravel driveway or nicking himself in the kitchen. He’d used them all. This was time for something completely different, in way more ways than he wanted.

Him, specifically, Dean Winchester him. What the hell – okay, bad choice of words. Why for the love of pie and all that was holy would the Lord Himself want Dean for anything? At all. Ever. At some point, maybe before Sam died and Dean sold his soul to that crossroads demon. That sort of divine attention would’ve come in handy right about then. Or right before Dad died. Or fuck, pulling Mom out of the goddamn fire.

Castiel was waiting for him in the kitchen when he went to get some water. Or maybe he was keeping watch for Lord-knows-what reason, or he might have been preening his feathers and hid them away as soon as Dean approached. He could’ve been cross-stitching for all Dean knew. But. Angel in the kitchen. Just standing there. His shoulder suddenly ached.

“Hello, Dean.”

He was too angry to be awed. “You mind telling me what’s going on?”

“You’ll have to be more precise.”

“You, me, the pit, the pulling, the saving. Why?”

“Those were my orders.”

“Yeah, you’re a freaking warrior of heaven and messenger of the Lord. You and everyone else up there. Who gave the orders?”

“Why do you insist you don’t deserve this?”

“Because if there was someone upstairs, if there was a God gunning for me to stay topside, He’d have shown His back to me a long time ago.”

“There’s a God.” Castiel didn’t even blink.

“I’m not convinced. Because if there is a God, what’s He waiting for? Why not pull me out Himself?”

Castiel looked away. “Many angels laid siege to Hell to rescue you. I was the one –”

“He’s not here, is He.”

“He’s here.”

“Oh, no, He’s not. So if He’s not here, who told you to get me out? Why get me out?”

“There is work for you, Dean.” His voice stayed low and steady, like he didn’t know how to use it except as a weapon.

“What’s there for me to do that nobody else can? Why me?”

Castiel didn’t blink, didn’t look away, just gave the news flat-out. “Because you showed yourself to be righteous.”

-

“What?” Sam asked, still wet from the shower, towel clinging to his legs as Dean stared at him. The anti-possession tattoo on his chest looked pretty new, the lines sharp and clean like on the one Dean had. It was professional, quality work, and nothing like the crude one he’d sketched on Sam when he was drugged out cold and in no position to protest.

“Where’d that come from?”

Sam shrugged and grabbed a pair of briefs from the suitcase. “I had it redone when you were gone. No offense, but you’re a pretty crappy tattoo artist.”

-

The Winchesters made their name by killing demons. Anything nasty that crossed their path once didn’t get a chance to it again – a hunter who couldn’t put down a simple ghost wasn’t any use to anyone – but every hunter had their own specialty, maybe vampires or shapeshifters. For the Winchesters, it was demons. Dybbuks, shedim, jinn, lilim, rakshasas, velatas, asuras, fiends, oni, succubi, incubi, imps, haakai, John and Dean and Sam smoked them all. They delivered death any and every way they possibly could: banishing, binding, shooting, slicing, dicing, splashing, salting, ironing, stabbing, exorcisms, mercy killings. For years Dean knew it was because Dad was gunning for revenge against the one that killed Mom, and killing the rest of them along the way was just the best possible way to make sure nobody else’s mother died like that. It helped him get to sleep at night and out of bed in the morning.

So when Cas zapped Dean back to 1973, he didn’t expect to learn it wasn’t a new tradition with his generation or a new line of work for his family. The demon hadn’t even been after Mom; it’d be coming for him and Sam. It didn’t know Mom would throw herself in its path to give them time to get out of there. Her very last hunt. Dean didn’t know if that made it better or worse, just that it made him hate it more, that it didn’t know what was coming and wouldn’t care if it did.

“You still don’t get it,” the demon said. “All the fuss, all the attention, and for what, any old hunter that’s twelve for ten cents? Wrong, future boy.”

It didn’t know. It wouldn’t know if Dean didn’t tell it anything, he could still warn Mom.

“There’s little princes like you all over, all the time, every generation, but things are moving faster now and we don’t have time to waste,” it added, almost purring. “Gotta cut this off at the pass, gotta keep things nice and steady and make sure it doesn’t get here on schedule.”

What the hell was it going on about? Princes? “Make sure what doesn’t get here?”

It acted like it hadn’t heard him. “It’d be nice to fix it so we don’t have to worry, but you’re like weeds, always creeping through no matter how many times we cut you off, and even when we try to pull out the roots you’re still around.”

“Do what you like, but I’m still going to kill you.” Keep it here, keep it talking, Dean thought. Let Mom get away. It wasn’t even making sense anymore.

“Right, now that I’d like to see.”

“You’ll see it all right. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but one day soon I’ll be there, so look into my eyes, you son-of-a-bitch, because I’m the one who kills you.”

The yellow-eyed demon Dean would kill in 2007 chuckled with his grandmother’s mouth in 1973. “So you’re going to kill me and save everyone, that’s your plan.”

“It’s a lot better than what you’ve cooked up downstairs.”

It kept laughing. “You think we don’t know what we’re doing? We’re five steps ahead of your little buddies, they’re not telling you anything you need to know, you don’t have a clue. Tell you what, I send you upstairs right now, you ask them when you get there.”

-

This case was exactly the kind they’d started hunting together on, and this whole wench-filled Oktoberfest-lite should’ve gotten Sam’s spirits up, at least to where he could relax around Dean and stop checking to see if he was present. Nothing much seemed to be working, not information about their grandparents, not the promise he wasn’t going back downstairs, not even teasing him in front of the beer wenches to prove he was still all there. There wasn’t much more Dean could do than keep talking and let Sam know he wasn’t going anywhere.

“I came back from the furnace without any of my old scars, right? You know, bullet wounds, knife cuts, none of the off-angled fingers from the breaks.” Dean grinned. “Except the one.”

Sam drew back to look at Dean from the corner of his eyes. “Are you saying…?”

“Cut by an angel. And I’ve got to say he’s a heck of a mohel – real quality work down there. Clean, no flab.”

“He didn’t just leave it off?”

“You think I wouldn’t recognize the difference?”

“Sorry I asked.” But he was smiling around the corners of his eyes, and looked more like the Sammy Dean remembered than he had in weeks.

-

When they finally had ten minutes to take a piss, Rufus dug through his rolodex, fished through his contacts, and came up with one Robert Singer. Dean remembered the guy pretty well: he’d known Dad through the usual networks, and he’d helped track down Bela forty-one – last year. He’d helped track Bela down last year right before his time was up. Singer said he didn’t need anything this time around, but accepted the first edition Houdini hardback with a gruff thanks and an offer of beer. Dean tried not to gulp it down.

Singer and Sam hit it off like burning, thousands of pages piled onto the kitchen table with annotations and footnotes galore, leaving Dean to his own devices, which translated to target practice out back. When he got back inside, they were still going at it, except Sam had pulled his laptop out and was busy scrolling through something-or-other that turned out to be newspaper death notices.

“Was it in sleep mode?”

Sam didn’t even roll his eyes at Dean’s old joke. Singer gave him a look, and Sam shrugged. “It’s considered work to turn it on. Anyway, I thought it was funny how the demons were gunning for Mom’s family and not Dad’s, but it’s not just that. See,” Sam pointed to a set of columns and didn’t wait for Dean to wipe the gunpowder off his hands. “It’s not just her relatives, it’s this specific line of them. It went for our grandmother, right?”

“Right.” Dean pulled up a chair, trying not to think of her dead on the floor.

Sam jabbered faster now, the way he did when he figured something out. “Well, these don’t say it was demons, but the papers never do. Some of these go really far back. The attacks went through to her, and the rest of our relatives here, but not anyone from –” And he started to paint a picture Dean didn’t want to think about, that it was never random chance, that there was something out beyond the edges of the map gunning for him and his family. And of course it was passed down to him through his mother. And somehow it was all his relatives on the thinnest of bloodlines going back and back, people he’d never met, and their cousins and those cousins, spreading out exponentially through the ages.

Where was Ash when they needed him?

Dean looked back to Sam. “What was Dad’s family before they came over?”

“Not much. It breaks down a couple of generations before Ellis, but nothing special. Mom’s dad, too.” Grandpa. Singer pushed a book over and Sam flipped it open, someone’s hunter genealogy project. “His side of the family, there’s not much there but it’s all pretty normal, and the records for him go back to the original colonies. But our grandmother, there’s really not much to go on.”

“So we find out what’s up with her, we find out why it’s up with us too.”

“Seems that way,” Singer put in. “These things don’t take interest like this just ’cause they’re bored. This is long-term planning like I’ve never seen.”

Dean put on another pot of coffee for the two of them and went back outside. There was an open hood near the south corner, perfect for stargazing, and he wrapped his arms around his legs and watched the Milky Way go by. There was so much more to the universe, there were people out there better than he’d ever be, he’d done plenty to make him deserve his forty years downstairs. There wasn’t a good reason why for him, and lots of reasons why not.

-

Getting everything together for their little demon picnic took less time than finding the right sort of place to have it. Dean wanted it in the middle of an open field so they’d have more escape routes, shooting down barns because that’d worked so well with Cas. Sam suggested a discarded fallout shelter to keep whatever they got trapped, reminding him demons weren’t angels and they knew how to kill those things pretty well by now.

They ended up in a church basement, Rufus and Sam teaming up to argue for the extra mojo it’d give and how they could use every bit. Dean threw up his hands and went along with it, trying to focus on the herbs and candles instead of Sam’s sudden pragmatism and lack of concern over being down there, and the news that he’d done this sort of thing at least three times a week the first two months Dean was downstairs.

“You’re pretty good at that.”

Sam shook the paint can and finished another sigil in the devil’s trap. “I got a lot of practice.”

“Making the traps, or the whole shebang, the calling and everything?”

“The whole shebang.” He stood back, glanced at Rufus, and took out the book and started reading. Didn’t stumble over the Latin, didn’t hesitate at the _Christos_ and the _Dominuses_ and _Patruses_ coming out of his mouth, hair whipping around his face as the ritual slapped up the air and started to flick the lights on and off. Four months away could be a long time, if you did it right. Dean bristled; long ago, he’d have been the one to do the readings. But he knew even if Sam offered, right now, he might not have said yes. Maybe.

But having a demon appear ten feet away kind of put a hold on any personal crisis of faith anyone might be having.

In all the fairy tales Rufus had in his house for entertaining two visiting kids, demons were always congenial, friendly bastards. Sure, they might steal your kingdom and zap you into slavery, but they were nice about it, and maybe you could even have tea with some of them or explore magic kingdoms on flying carpets as long as everybody stayed polite. Dean always hoped there was some grain of truth to that, and turned out there was: demons were congenial and friendly as all-get-out.

“Well, well, what’ve I got here,” it purred at Rufus. “Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure yet.”

“Well, we’ve only just met,” Dean smiled. “I’m sure we’ll get around to it.”

“Right.” It dropped the girl’s smile, tossing its hair over its shoulder. “Be that way. I’m just trying to have a bit of fun.”

“No, that’s not what we’ve heard.” Sam snapped the book shut. “You’re pretty busy, aren’t you?”

“I was until you bozos shot me up here.”

“Lay off,” Rufus said, crossed his arms over his chest. “We just want a few answers.”

“Forty-two, pi over two, Nineveh, Kirsten Shepard, Richard Nixon, Lee Harvey Oswald, the higgs-bosun.”

“Cute. Not what we’re after.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.” It grinned at Dean. “Your mother?”

“You know about our mother?” Fuck, shouldn’t tip a hand like that, but Dean couldn’t help it.

“Baby, baby, baby,” it crooned, “everyone knows about your mother.”

“Tell us, then,” Sam said.

“I’d prefer not to.”

Rufus shook his head. “You’re not in a position to have a say in the matter. See, we could just leave you here and let you miss out on all the fun. And I’ve been talking, and there’s a lot of fun going on out there, and my guess is you’re missing some right now.” He always looked terrifying when he grinned like that. “And my guess is you really don’t want to be missing out.”

It glared at them.

“Start talking,” Dean barked.

“If we had our way you two princes wouldn’t be here right now.” It spat out the word, looking at Dean, then Sam, then back again. “Your mother was one of the last we had to deal with, but she managed to keep herself on the down-low long enough to have you two. And with the family business being what it is, we wouldn’t have needed to worry about you if the guys upstairs hadn’t forced our hand. But they just aren’t as patient as they used to be. They really want to make that deadline.”

“How long have they got?” Rufus asked, going along with the near-nonsense.

“Thirty-one years.”

“What do you mean by princes?” Dean cut in. “Our parents weren’t anything –” He stopped when it started laughing.

“It’s so cute when you don’t know everything.”

“Tell me about my mother,” Sam said. And there was that sharp Sam voice, the one that he didn’t use unless he had to, the one that told people he was someone with whom not to be fucked. It stopped laughing, and Sam said again, “Tell me about my mother.”

“Be that way.” It stood with its arms akimbo. “Your mother was a two-bit whore that sucks Lilith’s big fat one every day.”

Sam said something in Latin and the demon convulsed, falling to its knees.

“She hated you and your brother, she never loved your father.”

Hebrew this time, and it looked like it was having a seizure.

“She’d hate you even more if she knew what you were doing.”

Another word, another language – Aramaic, from the sound of it – and the demon was shaking like a frog with electric current running through it.

“She was a princess. No –” It took a deep breath when it saw Sam start to speak. “ – Really. She was a princess, would’ve been a queen in another time and place, but she had to be born in America where you only ever had the one emperor. Princess.” It sucked in more air. “Direct descendant.”

“Of who?” Dean crouched down to look it in the eye.

“Your great, great, great, great to the power of great granddaddy.”

“Names, sweetheart.”

“He only ever needed the one.”

“Name, sweetheart.”

It smiled. “I’d prefer not to say.”

Sam spoke again, and it took the demon almost a minute to come down from the pain.

“What was that one?” Rufus asked.

“Spanish. Not really an exorcism, but you know, Catholic purification rites and all that. Ken dug it up – something for dealing with a _condenado_. Condemned one.”

“Good word,” Dean said without looking away from the demon, which was still panting. “You feeling better?”

“Fuck you.”

“Baby, there’s things I’d love to do to you that you can’t even buy in Vegas, but we’re kind of on the clock here, so if you don’t mind, just tell us who begat our mother way back at the beginning and then I’ll see what I can do.”

It rolled over onto its back and started to laugh. “Baby, I’m fucked already.”

“Might as well enjoy your way down. Name.”

“I’d prefer –”

“Sam?”

Sam let loose with whole paragraph this time, and the screams echoed from the ceiling right next to the two-syllable answer the demon cried out over and over again.

Sam let Dean do the final exorcism, but there wasn’t any victory in it this time. More like putting a rabbit in a trap out of its misery. He sighed, “Dean, one joke about the big ‘D’ and I swear I’ll hurt you.”

“No problem.” He didn’t feel like making one anyway.

-

It made sense, sort of, now that Dean knew how to look at it. There wasn’t time for any soul-searching about learning how deep his heritage went when there were more things after them that they needed to deal with. It was the implication of why he and Sam were the important ones, and going over the family tree taking up most of Rufus’ living room, starting on one wall and fanning out to cover the other three, all the deaths adding up, reasons to be glad polygamy used to be legal. Knowing you had more dead cousins than you could shake a stick at wasn’t the greatest feeling in the world.

There was a word for people who didn’t know their fathers, but nothing for people who didn’t know their mothers. You were supposed to know who your mother was. It was a given; she made you who you were in ways your father never could. Knowing about your mother was supposed to be a given, but here they were trying to figure it out. Forget lawyer, Dean thought – Sammy should’ve tried to be a historian, even a librarian. He was always way too happy doing all the reading.

They’d have to call Singer to see if he had any of the books they needed, and in the meantime they were going over family records to see if Mom ever willed them anything or left a note in one of his storage lockers. Right now, Rufus had broken out the coffee and he and Sam left Dean to go for a walk in the late evening.

He called Lisa, asked after Ben, made sure he was wearing his hamsa. “You made catcher, right?” He fiddled with his pendant, running his fingers over the worn letters, while Ben talked about pinch-hitting, and he was glad to listen. He’d be happy to talk for hours but hung up after thirty minutes to watch night creep up through the little park.

There were rituals to snare and bind demons – Dean knew at least three he could do with the stuff around him in the next fifteen minutes – but nothing on the books for angels. Too bad; if there were any, Cas would have a piece of his mind right now. And then again, angels were supposed to carry prayers up to heaven with them. “ _Shema_.” Dean stopped, looked around to make sure no one was around, and dropped to a whisper anyway. “ _Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai ehad. Baruch shem kavod malchuto, l’olam vaed._ ”

The lights flickered, the smell of ozone coming on strong like before lightning hit. And there was Cas standing at the edge of the shadows and haloed by the streetlight. “Yes, Dean?”

“Good to see you too.”

“Do you need me for something?”

“King David, huh.” Cas tilted his head to look at, well, with Cas it might be a galaxy beyond the current scope of humanity’s understanding of the universe, or it could just be him looking away. “He’s why you pulled me out,” Dean continued. “Bloodlines, and heritage, and all that glory. Now don’t get me wrong here, it’s nice to know that sort of thing still matters outside of England. But here’s the thing.” Cas was looking at him again, and did he ever blink? “If you need someone even remotely related to David, I’m not the only one out there. There’s Sam, there’s got to be a few cousins somewhere –”

“I’m afraid that isn’t the case.”

“What?”

“You and Sam are among the last extant descendants of David.”

“Oh.” It didn’t feel like getting doused with water so much as it felt like getting hit with a baseball bat. Dean knew the difference. “Well, isn’t that special.”

“It’s quite special.”

“Among, so there’s more?”

“Very few.”

“How few?”

“A negligible few.”

“Negligible to the point where you need to drag me out of Hell for David insurance? Why?”

“I’m afraid I can’t speak of such matters.”

“Bullshit. The demon we saw, it said your team was running out of time.”

“Dean, I’m needed –”

“Not tonight, Josephine. You’re not flitting away, you’re not zapping off somewhere to swing on a star, you’re staying right here to give me some answers. Running out of time for what?”

Cas sighed, and Dean had to wonder where he’d picked that up. “In the past we’ve always been able to keep pace with demons and their attacks, but as of late, they’ve been far more focused, less chaotic.”

“As of late being since last May?”

“Since 1983. We cannot afford to wait, and they’ve managed to force our hand.”

“So because they know what they’ve been doing for over twenty years, I get pulled out of Hell. That doesn’t sit right.”

Cas’s mouth tightened, and his words got a little harsher. “As you know, they’ve been systematically culling the line of David. You and Sam are the last righteous men among them, and when you were pulled down, we laid siege to Hell to rescue you.”

“Just in case you needed me for something.”

“We do need you, Dean.”

“For what? What do you need me for?” He was on his feet, yelling right up in Cas’s face. “What work is there for me? What is it! Answer me!”

If any of it affected Cas, there was no way to tell. “Dean, you and Sam are to bring about the world to come.”

“The what now?”

“The world to come,” Cas repeated, as serene as anyone could hope to be.

Dean swallowed, worked his jaw around the words before he said them. “We’re the messiah?”

“You or Sam, likely you.”

Dean knew what it felt like for the bottom to fall out of the world; this was just the same. “There’s no one else you could’ve tapped for this.”

“As I’ve told you, we cannot afford –”

Punching Cas was a supremely bad idea, the guy was the fury and wrath of heaven wrapped in a thin layer of human and it felt like punching a steel door but damn did it feel good. Cas didn’t react more than moving his head, so Dean did it again. And again, trying to tackle him, yelling he could’ve afforded it a long time ago, he could’ve saved his family, the angels should have been there, there wasn’t a reason Cas couldn’t have been.

Cas rolled with it, grabbing Dean’s arms and tossing him away for Dean to get back on his feet and run back at Cas, yelling while he charged – what do you need me for, why did you wait, you fuck, you fuck. He got Cas down onto the ground, punching him and leaving bloody trails on Cas’s clean skin, but it only took a moment for Cas to get on top somehow and grab his leg and then pain like he hadn’t felt since Hell. He didn’t stop, kept going and grabbed at the first thing he could reach, fishhooking Cas’s cheek and dragging him aside to get on top again.

Dean punched and kicked and bit and fought like an animal and Cas was always there, fighting back as hard as Dean gave. Dean was screaming his throat dry and if Cas was saying anything Dean couldn’t hear it, didn’t want to hear it. It’d be excuses and fuck excuses, there had to be a reason for it all. There needed to be a reason.

“There’s a reason,” Cas whispered. Dean was too tired to stand, kneeling on the ground bloody and sore next to Cas, clean and fit as ever, lying where Dean had crawled off him. “Dean, I assure you there’s a reason why we couldn’t wait.”

“The whole –” He coughed out some blood from when Cas had clipped him good in the chest with a knee. “– the whole Y-six-K thing, right?”

“The seventh millennium is approaching.”

“And we can’t.” He coughed again, spitting out a chunk of a tooth.

“Let me,” Cas touched him, and Dean was suddenly whole again, his shoulder throbbing and then going as quiet as the rest of his body. He couldn’t stop himself from staring as Cas sat down, his coat falling out around him. “We can’t afford to tarry any longer. Lilith is amassing her forces and has been for some time.”

“Since 1983?”

“Some time longer. We can’t say.”

“You don’t know, or you can’t say?”

“We don’t know. We’re far from omniscient.”

“And the whole messianic age and world to come is what she doesn’t want, right?”

“She and many others like her.”

“Other demons?”

“Most every supernatural being on Earth.”

Dean laughed and fell back, landing on the wet grass and looking up at the slowly-turning sky. “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.”

-

Sam didn’t take the news well.

“They can’t – it doesn’t work that way!” He was pacing, running his fingers through his hair and keeping them laced together on top of his head, and the glance Rufus gave Dean told him he was also worried about Sam going for one of his old rifles.

Dean tried to reassure him. “I know.”

“No, that’s not it. Look, it can’t come just because, we’re not enough for it, just because you and me happen to be here.”

“It can’t come unless we’re here.”

“Yes, but, no, it’s not just us, they can’t force it just because we’re both here and, Davidic by heritage. It can’t work like that.”

“They know that,” Dean tried again.

“So why are they doing it?”

“Dean,” Rufus said, turning to face him. “You said they’ve been working this a while, and that they can’t set it up unless you’re here.”

“You can’t just set it up!” Sam went back to packing, waving his arms around. “It doesn’t work like that! We’re not Messiah insurance!”

“No, I’m pretty sure you are,” Rufus pointed out.

“This. This.” Sam stopped packing to stand and shake. “They pulled you out of the pit, but didn’t do anything when I got backstabbed by Ruby. Why do they need both of us? Why you more than me?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“You goddamn should have! An angel right there, and you didn’t ask why?”

“I was kind of busy getting the shit kicked out of me.”

“You attacked him!”

“Okay, maybe I did, but –”

“Demons hunting us, angels using us, and you didn’t think to ask –”

“It took them forty years to get me out, Sam!” Dean was up in his face, yelling right back. “Forty goddamn years for a host of angels to get me out and I get you back in ten minutes, maybe they didn’t pull you out because I saved you before they could!”

-

Sam passed Dean another beer. They were sitting together on the hood of the Impala, watching the sun go down and the stars come out. They hadn’t been drinking long, barely getting started; Dean knew it’d be a while before either of them had enough alcohol in their system to deal with the news. He’d come back clean and fresh, and that included his tolerance – it’d be a while before he got his liver back to fighting strength. At least getting a buzz on didn’t take as long.

Clouds hushed the sky and a chill peered out from the trees; winter was coming sooner every day.

“I think it’s better this way,” Sam said.

Dean looked at Sam, who was looking at where the moon would be. “What do you mean?”

“This way, it’s not just us.” Sam had uncapped his bottle and hadn’t made a move to drink it otherwise. “I mean, if we were, maybe if we’d been fated to bring about the world to come since before we were born because of who our parents were, who knows what we’d be doing.” Looking down at it, he finally brought it to his lips and took a long drink. “But it’s not just us.”

“Anyone with the right heritage.”

“Yeah. Exactly. Not everyone, and not just anyone, but it could be a lot of people.”

“Except there’s maybe six to choose from.”

“Dean.”

“What? It’s true.”

“I know. But, that’s not what I’m trying to say.” He took another drink, almost draining the bottle. “I’m trying to say that if it’d gone another way, with destiny-capital-D, I don’t know. At least now there’s some…some room, I guess, to make a choice about this.”

It always came down to the choices you made. Dean rolled Sam’s words around in his head, trying to figure out what he hadn’t said out loud. “You don’t think it’s us.”

“I think it could be a lot of people.”

“Do you think it’s coming?”

Sam laughed. “Dean, if you’d asked me that a year ago, two years, maybe I’d have said yes.”

“Maybe?”

“It’s that angels are trying to force it to, what, the ones that are talking to us won’t say why, and demons are gunning for us and have been since before we were born, and we’re wanted by both sides. And what they want, it’s not something that they can set up like a set of dominoes. It’s up to us. All of us.” He swung the bottle around, signifying the rest of the world that wasn’t sitting on the Impala drinking beer, the people that had been at Sinai when Moses came down. “It can’t come unless we’re all ready for it.”

“And if I ask you now, do you think it’s coming?”

Sam laughed again. “God, I hope so.”

-

When they were completely in the middle of nowhere, they’d just curl up in the Impala; on the nights when they were just slightly to the left of it, they shacked up in the nearest motel. Even something a few rungs below a Motel 6 was still a clean place to sleep with indoor plumbing. Although Sam never quite got over that one place in Iowa where he’d had to pay for a shower. Dean thought of that look on Sam’s face when he flopped down on the bed. “Well, could be worse.”

Sam let his bag fall to the floor. “How?”

“Iowa, remember?”

He hated teasing him, but it was worth it for the full-body shudder. “Never mind.”

Dean lay down, head on the pillows. “Does the shower work?”

“Let me check. Yeah, it works.”

“It’s a start.” While Sam pissed, it occurred to Dean to check something else, so he scooted to the edge of the bed to open the drawer – huh. He hadn’t been expecting that. Maybe some things really were universal.

Sam made a face at the book Dean was reading. “Do those things come industry-standard?”

“That or they grow like mushrooms in damp motel rooms.”

“Well. Okay.” Sam rooted around in the desk and grabbed a pen. “Time to get started.”

Dean smiled and passed the Gideon Bible over, leaving Sam to write his own footnotes about the right translation for Hebrew-to-English-by-way-of-Latin. He’d done that for years when they were on the road together with Dad, and Dean rolled his head around on the pillow to get comfortable and Sam clicked the pen open, shut, open, shut. With Sam busy like that and Dean tired like this, he could almost pretend they were nineteen and fifteen again, and Dad was out killing a ghost, and he’d be back in tomorrow and – no. He sighed and opened his eyes. There wasn’t time for that.

“Do you ever wonder what the next guests think of your commentary?”

“I hope they find it useful.”

Good old Sammy.

-

There were ways to gank angels out of their vessels, and the way Cas had explained it, it was sort of like ripping someone’s soul out – you could do it if you had the right grip, and it wasn’t easy or pleasant for anyone involved. The way Jimmy Novak explained it, Cas had been roaring and fighting the whole way out, and Jimmy had tried his best to hold on but hadn’t been able to keep his metaphorical hands from slipping. Whatever had gotten to Cas was just that strong.

The first words out of Jimmy’s mouth were what Dean would’ve guessed someone would say if they woke up without an angel inside of them: disorientation, worry, fear, where am I, who are you, that whole megillah. He didn’t understand what he was saying exactly, though, not until he calmed down enough to stop using Yiddish and switch to English. That also made sense, him going back to the first language he’d learned to speak in that moment of panic.

Jimmy didn’t look like Cas. Dean watched him practically swallow the burger whole without bothering to chew. Sure they were the same height and had the same eyes and wore the same clothes, but the way the two of them looked, how they walked, the way they held themselves, it wasn’t Cas in the body sitting across from him right now. Even their voices were different, Cas’s all flat and gruff and Jimmy’s accent round and slanted at the same time.

“So what do you remember?”

Jimmy shook his head and took another long drink of his soda. “Before he left? Bits and pieces. Images, sounds – impressions, really. An angel inside of you, it’s kind of like being chained to a comet.”

“Doesn’t sound like much fun,” Dean said.

“Understatement.”

“Cas said he needed us for something.” Sam pressed, “Please tell me you remember that.”

Jimmy shook his head. “That, he didn’t talk about.”

“But he did talk to you.”

“Sometimes. Not as much after I let him in, but we’d still talk.” Something soft fluttered over his face. “He didn’t tell you anything?”

“Just that we needed to stop by where you we found you.”

Both sets of Jimmy’s grandparents came over years after all of Sam and Dean’s family was firmly entrenched in the United States. They’d made their way from Europe through China, trading one ghetto for another, until they finally reached America – Vienna to Shanghai to Ohio. He had a wife and daughter waiting for him somewhere, a life that had nothing to do with what made him special enough for an angel to take interest in him.

“Why did you say yes to Cas?” Dean asked when Sam was in the shower and otherwise too busy to listen in.

“Because he asked my permission. Because he told me that I was needed, that I was chosen for God’s plan as part of a deeper purpose.”

“And you believed him just like that.”

“No.” He didn’t even smile like Cas because Cas didn’t smile. “We talked, and – argued. It took…” He looked away, smile fading. “He always told me I was the one he needed.”

It turned out Jimmy was the one he needed, but not the only one he could use: a fourteen-year-old Claire Novak channeling the might and fury of a messenger of the Lord was a sight Dean knew he wouldn’t forget anytime soon. He looked a little too happy to be smiting the demons, but hey, they were the same ones who’d ripped him out of Jimmy in the first place to torture his vessel and get their hands on what intel they could. Dean could forgive Cas a little bloody revenge. Okay, a lot bloody, but the principle was the same.

When Cas knelt down next to Jimmy, speaking too quiet for Dean to hear them, it was pretty easy to imagine what he was saying: thanks for the meatsuit, I’ve got a brand new one, time to shuffle off. He didn’t know what Jimmy said to get Cas back inside – maybe he reminded him it’d be nice and roomy in there – and then the pure light of creation and Heaven filled the space again, and Claire was panting on her knees as Castiel strode forward in his old-new vessel.

“Why’d you go back into Jimmy?” Sam asked after Cas zapped them back to their hotel room.

“Because he asked me to take him.”

“Were you testing him to see if he’d give up his daughter willingly?”

“No.” Cas almost sounded offended at the accusation. “I had no need to test Jimmy’s faith, nor Claire’s. But he asked this of me, and I obliged him.” He looked back and forth at the two of them sitting on the edge of the beds. There was something almost human in his face, something that said there was something he couldn’t say to Dean and Sam, and didn’t want to try.

“I made sure to thank her,” he said, like them knowing that would help. Dean knew it did for him; at least the equivalent thanks, for keeping his vessel safe when he’d been dragged away from it, soothed the past few days just enough to let him think he wouldn’t need to drink to get to sleep tonight.

Thing was, demons alone weren’t strong enough to gank Cas. Not even a whole nest of them could do it, even if they’d gotten to him after chasing him across the world from Yemen to Australia to Michigan. They’d have to be working with something else, and knowing that was worth opening a bottle for, definitely.

Hell, maybe he should ask Cas take him to Australia when this whole thing was done. No way he hadn’t earned a vacation by now.

-

Indiana wasn’t Australia, but a fancy hotel would do in a pinch. It was raining enough to make Noah cry, and Dean wouldn’t have been surprised to see the wind blow some kittens and puppies around. Anything would’ve been worth stopping at, and that they happened to be in a place with chocolates on the pillows – well, who cared that they were in the middle of nowhere?

Sam, of course. Trust him to be untrusting. Sometimes that was just a pain in the ass, but in this case, it wasn’t paranoia. If you knew people were out to get you, it was just being perceptive.

Although Dean had to guess even Sam wasn’t expecting this many people. Maybe Dean should’ve noticed something was up when the hotel seemed bigger on the inside – which it was, because it had to be to house all the gods in attendance. He could barely see to the far end of the table. It wasn’t all of them, but there had to be at least sixty already, with more coming in and the room just getting bigger to fit, everyone under the roof staring at him and Sam. They were the only humans present, the guests of honor at this little shindig.

Baldur clinked a knife against a wineglass. “Ladies, gentlemen, those that are otherwise, welcome and thank you for coming. This I thought I’d never see again, so many gods under one roof.”

“Oh, we are so, so screwed,” Sam whispered to Dean.

“Now, we all know why we’re here.” Baldur’s voice boomed out around the room. “The Messianic Age of Jewish lore looms over us. Now, I know we’ve had our little disagreements, and we’ve managed to put those behind us. But it’s time to once again look towards the future, or once again, we’ll find ourselves without one. Now, we do have two very valuable bargaining chips,” and everyone turned to look at Sam and Dean, “the last righteous princes of the line of David. And thanks to Ma’at,” a small Middle Eastern woman with her hair pinned up stood to smile and bow at the round of applause, “we have enough information to allow us the position to make –”

“Allow?” An old man with an eye patch and fuck, the nametag ‘Odin’ stood up. “We don’t allow anything. This is our world again.” Most of the room said something in agreement, almost none of it in English. “Because a few birds are doing their best to force the end of the world before it happens, and it’s not even the end times yet. Jormungandr is still asleep, and Rocabarraigh hasn’t yet arrived.”

A tall, blond woman with the nametag ‘Brigid’ and her face split down the middle into ugly and pretty stood up next, and cleared her throat before speaking. “We need to remember why we’re here. Not just because of the princes, but stability. Neutrality towards one another.”

“All these angels understand is violence,” Kali growled. “This has to end in blood. To them, it’s their creator or us, and they never compromise. We have to show them we’re not who we used to be, make a stand for ourselves.” She looked at Sam and Dean like they were animals she might find in a pound. “I say we kill them.”

What Baron Samedi said next Dean didn’t understand, not in the exact vocabulary, but he could tell the guy was agreeing with Brigid and getting Kali’s dander up and enjoying himself. Dean couldn’t blame the guy for that. He glanced at Sam, who glanced right back, and they would’ve managed to slip out the back quietly if Horus hadn’t noticed them inching towards the door and crashed a chandelier right in front of them.

“Stay,” Kali commanded.

“Come on.” Dean turned around and held his hands out in surrender. “You don’t really need us here for this, do you? We can just go take a nap while you work out the details.”

“As a matter of fact, we do.”

“All right then.” Dean looked around the room, up and down the tables, nodded, “Okay.” He licked his lips, took a deep breath, then walked back to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down next to Ganesh and across from Loki. “Hey there. How you doing?”

“And what do you think you’re pulling?” Ganesh rumbled.

“Come on, Sam.” Dean pulled out the chair on his other side. “Grab me a drink, will you?”

“Listen to me, boy –” Odin started.

“No, sir, you listen.” Dean stood back up. “You’re all out of options here, and you know that. We know that. We know that you know that. And any other night of the year, I’d be doing my best to, well, kill you. My brother and I, we eat gods for breakfast. But this is, hey, this is a night that’s different from all other nights.” He fought to keep his voice steady. “You incestuous bastards. So even though there’s nothing I’d love more than to slit all your throats, you dicks, I’m gonna help you out. See what I can add to the conversation and maybe make it a bit easier for everyone here when the shit really hits the fan.”

Sam sat down next to Dean and handed him the water; Dean took a bigger drink than he needed to keep his hands from shaking. “So tell me, what exactly did you all get from teaming up with Lilith? Because if I know my demons, and I do, there’s nothing she won’t do to screw you over the moment she has a chance.”

Maybe it was something in the water, maybe it was because they wanted him to, but when Amaterasu opened her mouth and started to speak in Japanese, he understood her just fine. “Please remember that we have demons of our own. We can handle yours without any fuss.”

“Really.” Dean clenched his teeth in another fake smile. “Because it looks like there’s enough tricksters here to make sure everyone here knows you can’t trust anyone that wants to make a deal.”

“And there’s enough tricksters here that everyone here knows ways to get out of them,” Loki smiled.

Sun Wukong slammed a hand against the table. “This is hardly a case where an enemy’s enemy is a friend. We’ve labored and toiled and we can’t see that gone for nothing. We delay this, we stop their god from coming, we deal with the demons then. We can hold ourselves till then.”

“Like the first time we found ourselves without that competition?” Baldur’s laugh boomed out. “Oh, yes, we’ve come far since then.”

“Hold your tongue there,” he growled.

“If you insist.”

Ganesh grinned at Dean. “Do we have to worry quite so much? Their birds are in enough of a frenzy we won’t have to worry about them, and like we said, their demons aren’t going to put up much of a fight against all of us.”

“You know, you didn’t say, did your own little bird tell you how your creator abandoned your world?” Baron Samedi twirled his hat on his fingers. “For a supposedly loving parent, he sure doesn’t stick around.”

“And you would know, how?” Dean shot back.

Mercury was suddenly behind them, hands on their shoulders. “As nice as your enthusiasm is, perhaps it is for the best if the children leave the room.”

It didn’t feel like Cas’s zapping, which didn’t feel like anything and moved him to another place in the time between seconds; this was closer to being thrown out of a bar by the seat of his pants. He landed facedown on the bed, and when he recovered enough to realize where he was, Dean swore; at least they could’ve given them fresh chocolates.

“Well, there goes that plan,” Sam said from the floor. Bastard hadn’t even tried to aim both of them.

“It was worth a shot. Hey, it got us out of there, didn’t it?”

“Except now they’re planning our fate without any input whatsoever.”

“Bite me, bitch.”

“Jerk.”

“So what’s our plan now?”

“Door’s locked.” Sam sighed. “We can’t run, we can’t wait, we can’t bargain, we can’t fight.”

“We could always pray.”

“Of course we can.”

“Aww, come on, it’s worth a shot.”

“Sure it is.”

“You got any better ideas?”

Sam glared. “If you insist.” Taking a deep breath, turning East, he started, “ _Adonai s’fatai tiftach, ufi yagid t’hilatecha._ ” Bending and bowing and straightening up, “ _Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu veilohei avoteinu, elohei Avraham, elohei Yitzchak, veilohei Yaakov._ ”

Dean hadn’t heard Sam pray in years. This was just plain recitation, nothing in the words, not even the hope they’d work, but Sam’s kept his face clear and his eyes shut the way he’d always done. “ _Haeil hagagol hagibor v’hanorah, eil eil-yon –_ ”

There was a crash somewhere outside the room, stopping Sam right away, shaking the room like they were in an earthquake or on a volcano. It went on for almost a full minute before stopping. Dean looked up from between his arms at the cracked ceiling. “What the Hell was that?”

“I – don’t know.” Sam checked the door again, and this time it opened. It must’ve been soundproofed, because all the noise came rushing in: screaming, shouting, roaring battle cries, tidal and huge – divine, even.

Dean stepped into the hall, motioning for Sam to follow a little behind. Whatever was going on, it was still pretty far away – bigger on the inside, remember – and if they could hear it from here, they really shouldn’t be going closer. But that was kind of their job description, so down the hall they went.

“Ugh.” The smell hit them next, brimstone and ash and something – Dean stumbled back, turning to clutch at a wall until the world stopped spinning. Years ago he and Dad did a case in a slaughterhouse; it smelled like this, except this was worse.

“Dean?”

He swallowed, took a deep breath. “Let’s keep going.”

There were more sounds, blood flowing out from under the doors to soak into the carpet and get their boots wet, light flashing through the cracks. Dean looked at Sam, who looked back at Dean and nodded. On three, he and Sam kicked opened the doors.

Dean suddenly remembered what he’d said about angels getting their hands dirty. Bodies were piled up around the room, some of them still moaning, blood everywhere from the table to the ceiling. There were pieces of things scattered around, like people had been ripped apart without anyone caring about making a mess – entrails, fingers, hearts still beating, hands still clutching swords or glowing or trying to crawl towards Sam. He kicked it away. There wasn’t any point to trying to avoid stepping in anything – the carpet squelched under their boots – just the worst of the squishy stuff.

And in the middle of the room, with hands stained to the elbows and a sword still dripping, stood an angel, a terrifying and awesome warrior of God. He and two others, and they were all that was left.

“The sheer arrogance,” Kali swore, four swords to the angel’s one, and he was still holding his own, dancing with her, clashes ringing out in time with flashes of the shadows of an angel’s wings. “You think you’re the only ones who matter. There are many of us, and we were here first. If anyone gets to end this world, it’s me.”

“Your world, Kali.” He blocked, moved, spun about, “If it’s your world you want to end, that’s fine by me.” His blade went right through her where her heart would be, and she crumpled and wailed. “But not ours. It’s not yours to decide.”

In one swift motion and graceful arc, he pulled his sword out and spun around and cut off Loki’s head, who’d been coming up right behind him. The head rolled over to where Sam and Dean were standing, and a moment later, the guy was right there too, one boot holding it in place. They had to look down to make eye contact, and wasn’t that a kick in the head.

“Relax,” he smiled. “They’re just pagans. Oh, shoot, where are my manners?” He was suddenly clean, hair combed back and even his sword was polished and sparkling, and he held out a hand, “Gabriel. Pleased to meet you.”

“The. Archangel.” Sam didn’t exactly ask for confirmation so much as declare it.

“God is my strength, that’s me.” He grinned. “Now, what say we blow this popsicle stand?”

Dean did his best to say something. “Uh.”

“You’re welcome for saving your asses, by the way. They were planning on carving you up and eating you. Literally. You should’ve seen the kitchen.”

“Thank you?”

Loki moaned under Gabriel’s foot, and he kicked the head aside. “You be quiet. The monotheists are having a discussion.”

Somehow that got Dean’s words back. “Was all this necessary?”

“What do you mean?”

“The –” he waved his hand around the room. “The this. The slaughter.”

Gabriel burst out laughing. “Come on, they’re not dead-dead. They’re just…killed. There’s a difference. They’ll be fine. Eventually. They should respawn okay in a year or two.”

“You could’ve just zapped us out of here, or –”

“Holding spell on us,” Sam reminded him. “He had to kill the one making it.”

“And I even asked them politely, but they weren’t willing to risk this little confederacy, so,” Gabriel shrugged, “we had to take them all out just to be sure.”

“We?”

“Mike and Raphie left to catch the runners.”

“Yeah.” Dean looked around, at the bodies pinned to the ceiling and the guts on the walls. “Job like this, you need the big guns.”

“Thank you. I always take pride in my work. There’s not much chance to do a good smiting these days.”

“We should –”

“Get out of here? My thoughts exactly. You were thinking about Australia, right? Adelaide’s really nice this time –”

“We should do something for them.”

“What?”

Dean swallowed, crossed his arms over his chest, jerked his chin to Kali’s body, the room’s new centerpiece. “We should do something for them.”

“At least clean it up in here,” Sam offered.

“And why should I?”

Dean smiled without feeling it. “God wept for the Egyptians.”

Gabriel looked from Dean to Sam, Sam to Dean, eyes and face sharp as his sword, then broke it when he grinned. “You two really are just as righteous as Cas told us.”

-

They ended up at a little bed-and-breakfast over in California somewhere in the Napa Valley, one of the places that even forged credit cards couldn’t easily afford. Traveling with hedonistic archangels had its perks. He and Sam even got their own rooms.

Individual bathrooms messed with the forced quaintness, though, so around two his bladder demanded he get out of bed and deal with more pressing Earthly matters. Normally, he’d do his business half-awake and fall back to sleep without a fuss, but tonight, with Sam’s room on the way to the toilet, he had to stop and wake himself up so he wouldn’t miss anything. Sam was still awake, talking to Gabriel. The bedside lamp was on, making a little island of light in the dark, and Dean clung to the wall to stay hid.

“He never wanted blind faith, Sam. It’s not meant to be easy.”

“It’s not the struggle. You can’t have a crisis of faith without faith,” Sam whispered back. “Being able to maintain it –”

“Free will is your gift. God gave it to you so you’d be able to make the right choices. It’s not just because of who you are. That’s part of it, Sam, but it’s more in the choices you make.”

They were both barefoot. Dean didn’t know why he noticed that, but there they were, neither of them wearing shoes, and maybe he noticed it was because it was so normal to take your shoes off when you were getting ready for bed before you got sidetracked with debate about fate and free will. It was probably the most polite thing to do when you were talking about the nature of God and faith and righteousness with an archangel.

“I didn’t choose this destiny deliberately. It wasn’t something I set out to accomplish.”

Dean stood there a while, listening to them debate, thinking all they needed was some Gematria and it’d be the Yeshiva they’d never had. Sam didn’t notice him at all, but Gabriel glanced over just as Sam started to talk about zekhut and what that meant for him and Dean, and with a twitch of his hand, the door slowly swung shut. Well. He could take a hint.

-

“What?” Sam asked the next morning when he sat down at their table and Dean nearly choked on his pancakes in shock.

“Where’d that come from?”

Sam tipped his fedora back a bit. “I had it stashed in one of Dad’s storage units. Gabriel got it for me this morning.”

“Nice of him.” He smiled. “Did I ever tell you it looks good on you?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Well, it does.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

-

Not that Dean would admit to it, but the look on Sam’s face when he saw his old tallis was almost enough to make a one-time exception for chick flick moments, and getting back to morning and evening prayers was pretty nice. It was nearly their old routine before all this crazy destiny train stuff started going down. Then again, after the past two months, ganking a skinwalker in Arizona and a nest of vampires in Colorado was almost relaxing. It all came down to what you were used to, and what it took to faze you.

Angels sitting across from you in a diner kind of set the bar pretty high. Raphael had been gathering intel bit by bit, enough to puzzle it out, and Cas thought it would be best if he delivered the news in person.

The first confederacy of pagan gods had gone pretty much unnoticed by Heaven in the sudden absence of God. This one would’ve been the second, and it was the shaky alliance with demons that tipped the angels up to it. Plenty of people didn’t want God back – power vacuums and shaky treaties, a chance to rip the world apart and start over, monsters running wild, some of them still angry about what happened in Egypt. Signs and portents were popping up all over the world, nothing done at random anymore.

“We’re still preparing,” Raphael said, warm breezes fluttering the napkins. “We can’t let our work go for naught.”

“So when we get everyone ready and the Messiah comes…” Dean let the end of the sentence hang.

Raphael picked it up. “When he arrives, God will follow.”

“Sort of a hard reboot to the universe?” Both angels stared at him.

“How would we go about bringing Him back?” Sam asked.

But the angels were already gone, leaving them stuck with the tab.

“God, I hate it when they do that.”

-

Hanukkah was always Dean’s favorite holiday. The story of the Maccabees, fighting against impossible odds to triumph in the end, was basically the story of the Winchesters. And even though he’d never admit it to anyone, not Cas or Rufus or even to Sam, the idea of getting home back – of being able to get your home back, of it not being gone forever, was something he always wished he was strong enough to see through.

Sam, of course, loved Pesach. Most years it meant salad instead of sandwiches and eggs instead of oatmeal at breakfast, but they always managed to find a Hillel or Chabad house open for at least one seder, and the few times they’d managed to take a breather at Rufus’ there was the chance to take stock and think, they haven’t gotten us yet. We’re still free. Sam told him once, four and forty-four years ago, that it was the idea of leaving this life for a better one that he liked, the idea that there were better times coming still.

Rufus had already cleaned the house top to bottom, Sam and Dean arriving in time to help him switch the plates over and drop the last forbidden foods off at the closest food bank. He and Sam were cutting up carrots for the soup, chopping up the goat – “Beats lamb by a mile,” Rufus always said – and that left Dean to take some time to call Cas for a visit and some answers.

“So what’s in it?” Dean rubbed the chain of his amulet, letting his fingers brush over the letters he’d memorized long ago. “What makes it so special I gotta hang onto it?”

“It’s a name,” Cas told him.

“That’s it? A name? Of who?”

“To be more precise, it’s the name.”

Dean blinked. “Wait. The name? The big one? Jehovah?”

“Not quite.” Cas looked at the amulet. “It’s the name as it’s meant to be said in the Temple.”

“So when it gets built back up and we’ve got the space to say it, this opens up and we get to read it.” Cas nodded. “And all the angels of heaven are betting that when we say His name, He shows up.”

“That’s correct.”

“So you’re bringing about the world to come to bring God back. Seems a little backwards.” Dean swallowed, wiped his face, huffed a breath, “You sure it’s gonna work? That He’ll show?”

“He’ll come,” Cas promised.

Dean waited alone until Sam called to him to come inside.

Seders weren’t supposed to be happy, not really, and they weren’t supposed to be an ordinary dinner party either, but this year made this night more different than the any of the rest the three of them ever had. Everyone felt different this year. What they’d gone through these last few months, and what they knew would be coming – in all the days of their life – made the whole thing feel more than a little strange. It wasn’t all metaphor anymore. Sam sang the four questions as usual, Dean shuddered at slaying of the first-born son as usual, and Rufus brokered the argument over who’d open the door as usual. It wasn’t in the siddur but it was just as ritualized.

“Well, someone’s got to get it.”

“You,” Sam pointed to Dean.

“No, you.”

“Why not both of you?”

“All right, if he says so,” Dean chuckled.

“If he says so,” Sam answered.

Rufus kept smiling. “You two had better –”

 _Knock, knock._

Everyone stopped. There was another knock on the door. They kept quiet, and then there was another.

“Somebody should get that,” Rufus said to no one in particular.

There wasn’t more knocking. It could’ve been anything. Someone here by accident. A demon. A vacuum cleaner salesman. Mormons. But Dean knew that wasn’t who was on the other side of the door, that there was only one person it could be. Dean glanced around, clenching his hands to keep them from shaking. Sam was right behind him when he undid the lock and opened the door.

He’d never seen the guy in his life, and he didn’t look like any of the illustrations he’d seen in picture books when he was a kid. No flowing robes and white beard, the guy had a close-cropped brown one and jeans and a jacket instead, but there was no mistaking who this was. There was a lot he wanted to say to the prophet, but all he could think of was, “What kept you?”

“Dean, be polite,” Rufus called out. “Let him in.”

“Right, right,” he stepped to the side, pulling the door open farther, “Won’t you come in?”

“We’ve already got some wine for you,” Sam offered.

Dean watched Elijah sit down at the table, sighing like he’d come a long, long way. And really, he had. Rufus passed him his cup, and he took a long drink. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Last year, he’d opened the door to no one, nothing, no future and no hope. But now, after what he’d gone through? Next year – no way Dean was looking forward to the year that was coming. But next year – Sam’s hand on his shoulder, always together fighting for the future, the world to come – next year, in Jerusalem.


End file.
